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• • March 16, 2022 at 10:16 am #14360995
    Darrel Eppler

    Participant

    I need to output PDFs that are true black-&-white, and often do so using the Dot Gain 15% setting when creating a PDF from InDesign. Other times I need to convert an existing PDF that should be B & W but contains CMYK data to true B & W, and I use Tools > Print Production > Convert Colors in Acrobat Pro to do so, setting the Output Intent to Dot Gain 15%. On a recent job additional PDF pages were inserted into a converted PDF, requiring converting the colors a second time. Would setting the Output Intent to Dot Gain 15% for the send conversion result in a final dot gain of 15%, or 30%, or something else?

    –Darrel

  • March 16, 2022 at 5:14 pm #14361007
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I’ve never tried that, but I assume that the dot gain conversion would be applied twice to the original images. As for what the dot gain would be… that sounds like a math problem. If you do 15% two times, what’s the result? Hm. I think it’s tricky because dot gain is usually not a linear thing… it’s usually a curve, so it’s applied differently at 80% than at 50%… tricky. But in general, yeah, I wouldn’t run it twice on the same images. That’s just me.

  • March 21, 2022 at 2:19 pm #14361413
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Hi Darrel,

    I’m not sure, if converting to dotGain using Convert Colors is part of your process, but to my experience, it will definitely add a slight dot gain every time you convert your document. If you ask me, I would prefer to use the preflight fix –– “Convert color to B/W”. This preflight profile is purely based on 15% dotGain. Your gray tones will remains the same even after adding a color page to the pdf and re-preflighting it. Just give it a try.

    Thanks,
    Masood

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